Without doubt Maps was the most ambitious of the site-specific projects brought to fruition by Aphids during the company’s first fifteen years; it was realised in collaboration with sister company Kokon. In meticulous detail Maps explored conceptual and practical correspondences between cartography, musical notation and scripts for performance. Sustained dialogue between the artists—based in Europe, Japan and Australia—produced a suite of scenographic designs and installations; handwritten scores (both solo and ensemble works); texts, and a handprocessed film. Maps audiences were itinerant, led on a counter-intuitive route through grand, historic interiors: Part 1 was staged in the North Melbourne Town Hall, Part 2 in a former Freemason’s temple in Copenhagen, both buildings selectively transformed by theatrical illusion.

Writing for Maps began with ‘Surveys of routes miss what was’, a poem in nine parts. The title quotes from Michel de Certeau’s essay ‘Walking in the City’, and the text traces a pathway to introspection using techniques of repetition and accumulation. It was taken up by Louise Curham as a script for her film; the film, in turn, served as a moving musical score which was accompanied also by live recitation. In performance, ‘The Lecture Piece’ concentrated in a different way on the musicality of formal speech, emphasising the spatialising rhetoric of argument, while discussing the history of cartography in western Europe.